oi.uchicago.edu ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAINTINGS oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu Internet publication of this work was made possible with the generous support of Misty and Lewis Gruber ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAINTINGS SELECTED, COPIED, AND DESCRIBED BY NINA M. DAVIES WITH THE EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE OF ALAN H. GARDINER VOLUME III DESCRIPTIVE TEXT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MCMXXXVI oi.uchicago.edu PRINTED AND BOUND IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD oi.uchicago.edu SPECIAL PUBLICATION OF THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO JAMES HENRY BREASTED EDITOR THOMAS GEORGE ALLEN ASSOCIATE EDITOR oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu PREFACE By ALAN H. GARDINER To trace the history of the enterprise which has culminated in the present work it is necessary to go back twenty-five years and more, when Nina M. Cummings married Nor- man de Garis Davies and took up her abode in Kurna, where her husband was engaged in copying the tombs of the Theban nobles on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Endowed with a gift for copying, Mrs. Davies immediately set about making coloured facsimiles of the more interesting subjects on the tomb- walls, some of which were incorporated in the New York series, while a few were disposed of elsewhere. It so happened that about the same time A. E. P. Weigall, then Inspector-General of the Service des Antiquitis at Thebes, had engaged my own interest in the tombs under his supervision, and together we determined to draw up a catalogue of those precious, but until then much neglected, monuments. I have related in another places how our task found its accomplishment. In connexion therewith it seemed to me a thousand pities that the results of Mrs. Davies's labours should not be kept together to form a permanent archive, and thanks to her generous acceptance of my offer it was arranged that I should acquire the integral output of her work. A few years later, however, we agreed that half of each season should be de- voted by Mrs. Davies to assisting her husband. Through their combined efforts, supplemented by those of others, the Metro- politan Museum has amassed a collection of coloured facsimiles of Egyptian painting with which my own cannot compare. None the less the latter, being continued year by year down to 1929 x Gardiner and Weigall, A Topographical Catalogue of the Private Tombs of Thebes, London, 1913. vii oi.uchicago.edu PREFACE (with a gap of two years during the war), has eventuated in well over a hundred pictures, which have evoked great admiration wherever they have been exhibited.' Of these, twenty-two have been presented to the British Museum, where they can now be seen in the Third Egyptian Room, excellently exhibited through the skill of the present Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian collections. A further outcome of Mrs. Davies's work was the inauguration of the Theban Tombs Series, a publication of complete tombs edited by Norman de Garis Davies and myself conjointly and issued under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Society. In these volumes the Plates had perforce mostly to be in line, repro- duction in colour proving too costly. None the less, the five volumes contain in all nineteen colour Plates of great fidelity, if not of outstandingly artistic appearance. Meanwhile, however, the Metropolitan Museum had embarked, thanks to the liberality of Mrs. Tytus, upon a series of tomb-publications conceived on a more sumptuous scale. The Tytus Memorial Series, embodying the work of Norman de Garis Davies and his assistants, contains in its impressive folios no less than sixty-three high-class coloured facsimiles from the specific tombs treated. There remained, however, room for another work of a yet more opulent kind in which the paintings should be selected from a wider field, and should cover the entire range of dynastic history. Little could we imagine that such a work would ever come within the sphere of possibilities, the cost being prohibitive. It has now to be recounted how our dream was realized. In the year 1927 Professor Breasted, himself deeply interested in Mrs. Davies's work, put me in touch with Mr. Welles Bos- worth, Mr. John D. Rockefeller Junior's architect, and next year ' Selections were shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in i923, at Brussels in 1925, and at Oxford in 1929 and again in 1933. viii oi.uchicago.edu PREFACE I had the privilege of showing Mr. Bosworth at my own home in London the treasures that Mrs. Davies's industry had accu- mulated for me. Despite the interest exhibited by my visitor, it was not without extreme surprise that, in April 1929, I received from Professor Breasted the intimation that Mr. Rockefeller, who had already so handsomely financed the Abydos undertaking of the Egypt Exploration Society and the Oriental Institute, might also be willing, on certain conditions, to undertake the compre- hensive publication of Mrs. Davies's life-work. At length the negotiations were successfully completed and, thanks to Mr. Rockefeller's munificence, Egyptology has become endowed with a pair of volumes hardly to be equalled in the entire range of ancient studies. A certain number of supplementary copies had to be prepared, and these are in the possession of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The question as to where, and by whom, Mrs. Davies's facsimiles were to be reproduced exercised our minds for many a long day. At last it was decided to entrust the work to the Chiswick Press (Messrs. Whittingham & Griggs) and, arrived at the end of our task, we see no reason to regret our decision. Those who have experience of the mysteries of colour- reproduction are well aware of the technical difficulties which it still presents. Superficially regarded, the results often seem well- nigh perfect-until examined side by side with the originals which they reproduce. Then the inevitable differences become very ap- parent. Candour does not permit us to affirm that the Plates of the present work are in every case absolute facsimiles of Mrs. Davies's paintings. Yet a very high standard of faithfulness has undoubtedly been reached, and for this we are deeply indebted not only to the Chiswick Press corporately, but also to its manager Mr. Butfield and to his highly skilled assistants. Of the latter, we recall with gratitude the great devotion of the late Mr. R. Tyrer, ix b oi.uchicago.edu PREFACE who in the early stages exerted all his enthusiasm and exceptional technical ability to achieving results of the requisite quality. Since his regretted death we have found in Mr. G. Jones a worthy and no less painstaking successor to him. The coping-stone to our labours has been set by the excellent typography and book- production of the Oxford University Press, where print and binding have been executed. The examples of Egyptian painting here displayed cover aperiod of some sixteen hundred years, from the very beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (circa 2700 B.c.) down to the end of the Twentieth Dynasty (iioo B.c.). Outside these limits there is little of value to record, for the very archaic painting discovered by F. W. Green at Hierakonpolis (First Dynasty?) may be considered to belong to Prehistory rather than to the genuine Egyptian tradition, while the Graeco-Roman mummy-portraits belong to the art of Greece rather than to that of Egypt. Within our period the scenes selected for reproduction are very unevenly spaced out. Of the Old King- dom we give but four examples, and of the Middle Kingdom but seven. The reason lies in the unequal distribution of the material, not in capricious preferences of our own. Most of the pictures here reproduced have perforce been derived from tombs, which in the Old Kingdom usually employed low relief. Such reliefs were indeed coloured, but the colouring was subordinated to the sculpture, and has, moreover, perished in the vast majority of cases. The Middle Kingdom tombs contain much more flat paint- ing, but the existing examples (with the exception of one magni- ficent tomb at Beni Hasan and perhaps another one at el-Bersheh) are for the most part coarse and uninteresting. It is possible, how- ever, that we might have added slightly to our Middle Kingdom selection had the tombs of Meir been more accessible. Such not being the case, fully four-fifths of the paintings shown in our Plates x oi.uchicago.edu PREFACE belong to the four hundred years separating the reign of Hatshep- sut (1497-1475 B.c.) from the last of the Ramessides (Io9o B.c.), and are taken from the tombs of Thebes. The choice of a hundred and four specimens of Egyptian paint- ings has been far from easy. We hope to have included the out- standing masterpieces in this branch of Egyptian art, but these are very few in number, nor could we confine ourselves to choosing merely what was aesthetically best. Variety both of subject and of treatment had to be borne in mind, and this necessitated the inclusion of samples the reverse of beautiful. Difficulty was occa- sioned by the fact that to duplicate pictures recently well repro- duced in model publications like those of the Metropolitan Museum would have been unfair to their authors and also an offence against the proper economy of our science. Some over- lapping was inevitable, since we could not entirely eliminate representatives from the tombs of KIenamin, Nakht, and others edited by Mr. Norman de Garis Davies. We trust, however, that if we have sinned at all we may be considered to have sinned with discretion.